Open Source for municipalities

The City of Schwäbisch Hall is innovative and strikes a new path. As one of the first municipalities of Germany, Schwäbisch Hall consistently places emphasis on OpenSource.

The comprehensive introduction of e-mail and internet for all members of staff has started in 1997. Open Source software for internet servers, proxies and email permitted the city administration to realize efficient solutions economically and in time.

In 2001, the support for the proprietary standard programs (operating system and „Office “- package), which have been used up to then, was discontinued by the manufacturer. A change to the following versions of this software would have had extensive consequences. Besides, the hardware used at that time would have had to be exchanged and the City of Schwäbisch Hall would have had to pay substantial license fees for the upgrade. Additionally, at this time, the income from the trade tax broke down.

Therefore, it was obvious for the responsible persons to weigh up alternatives. The positive experiences in the past encouraged the administrators to use OpenSource software as well for the equipment of the future workplaces.

After the starting signal by the mayor, the EDP department with the former project partners SuSE (now Novell) and IBM provided the first computers with the operating system Linux and OpenOffice.org for text processing, tables, presentation etc.. The staff were trained on the job to be able to operate with the „new“ programs. At the end of the training courses they found their desktops ready for use.

In the meantime, the administration is almost comprehensive equipped with OpenSource workplaces. The emphasis of the work of the IT-responsible persons today lies on evaluation and conversion of special applications referred to open technologies.

An example for this is the revised council information system (cf. link beside), which was developed consistently with OpenSource techniques. It can be downloaded free of charge.

Altogether, the responsible persons of the City of Schwäbisch Hall are convinced that open systems have perspicuous advantages:

• They are flexibly applicable and can be adapted to particular needs
• The multiplicity of developers and supporting medium-size suppliers ensure safe enterprise.
• Open formats and open standards are the only way in which information can be conserved for the future.

The city administration will continue on their successfull OpenSource strategy.